my humble muffins baking journey

Sour Cherry Muffins

It’s been a few weeks since I last updated this blog, and that is because I went on a vacation! Woohoo~~! I believe all teachers work hard during the school term and look forward to having a really good break during the school holidays. I love going on vacations!

This June I went on a tour with my family to Croatia. Lovely country, lovely people, but nope, not lovely weather. It was freaking hot! But I guess it’s the same for most European countries because another colleague also came back from Switzerland, a shade darker.

Good news is, Croatia has lots of farmers’ market during the summer period… and boy I love shopping at their farmers’ market! There are so many local produce and for someone who has just taken up the interest of baking, I see these products as the ones I could use for baking! We bought LOTS of jam – interesting flavours are like figs with orange, and figs with cocoa. They produce good figs there!

However, I chose to give away the figs ones to relatives, and kept just one jar of sour cherry for myself. I did that because I also bought 2 small bottles of their local cherry wine, Maraschino, and I thought that they will go well together!

I found a normal jam muffin recipe online, and modified it by adding 1 tablespoon of Marachino.

I always love food stuff that has some alcohol in them. I’m not a frequent drinker, but who can argue that liquor chocolates just has that bit more oomph, especially the kind that flows out when you bite into them! Mmmmm!

Yup that’s the sour cherry jam I bought from Croatia. I still have quite a bit left, so I’ll be using them again tomorrow when I try to bake a Raspberry Swirls Cheesecake. (I freaking love cheesecake!!)

Add a generous dollop of jam onto the batter in each muffin cup. The jam is more sourish than sweet, therefore there is less chance of the muffins being too sweet, compared to if I’d used normal fruit jams.

Swirl the jam around using a toothpick…

And this is the end product! Sadly the cherry liquor could not really be tasted, but the jam is pretty yummy! It might be due to the alcohol that the muffin did not rise high at the end of baking, but was actually rather flat in comparison to the typical muffin. Taste wise it’s good, not overly sweet. Texture is also good as it comes off the muffin cups easily and doesn’t stick to the paper. An adjustment I would make would be to just bake it 5 minutes longer to just harden it a tad more.

I’ll retype the modified ingredients list here. Just something to take note, I prefer using grams for measurements, and I’ve also halved the recipe to bake 6 muffins instead of 12, as the latter is too many for just 2 of us to finish.